Everyone in venture has a take on AI. We wanted the data behind the takes.
The Visible AI Sentiment Report is our first twice-yearly look at how AI is actually being adopted across venture capital firms. We surveyed operators, investors, and fund managers on what's working, what isn't, and what's holding most firms back from going deeper. Check out the results below:
The Gap
81% of respondents are highly confident AI will transform how their firm operates in the next 12 months. The median confidence score was 9 out of 10.
Yet 30% of those same firms adopted zero new tools in the past 90 days. 40% built zero new workflows in the same period.
We're calling it the belief-action gap. And understanding why it exists is more interesting than the gap itself.
Only 16% of firms cite lack of clear ROI as a barrier to deeper AI adoption. The real blockers are security concerns (51%), tool overload (49%), and data quality (41%).
Firms aren't sitting on the sidelines because they doubt AI. They're sitting on the sidelines because getting started is operationally hard. That's a very different problem to solve.
The Opportunity
Internal ops leads at 57% of firms. But LP reporting sits at just 16%. Identifying trends across portfolio data is at 16%. Benchmarking portfolio performance is at 8%.
The highest-value use cases are the least utilized. That gap points directly to the data problem sitting underneath most AI adoption in venture. General-purpose tasks don't require your firm's data. Portfolio intelligence does.
The Current Usage
The average Visible customer extracted more than 10x the metrics via AI this year compared to last. Over 50% of all metrics in Visible are now extracted via AI Inbox rather than entered manually.
The firms building a clean data foundation now are the ones who will unlock the highest-value use cases next.
The Question Behind It All
Every hour reclaimed from repetitive work points to the same question: what do you do with the time you get back?
The firms that will pull ahead aren't the ones that automate the most. They're the ones who use that time to get closer to their founders, their LPs, and their teams.
In a world where every firm has access to the same models and increasingly the same data, the competitive advantage is still the same one it has always been. The relationships.
Download the full report and check out all of the insights below:
